OldTools Archive

Recent Bios FAQ

260656 Thomas Conroy 2016‑12‑09 Re: early stanley boxes
Claudio wrote:
"Do you have the capacity to make those 'slide on' decals that Stanley
applied on tool handles?  I have a few tools with the bluish remnants of
these.  They put them on the sides of plane handles, chisels, drills,  and
so on, like many of the tool makers.  A friend of mine  just reproduced one
of the original Marples decals, to put on his restorations- it was a fairly
expensive undertaking apparently, and they ended up costing about thousand
dollars for 350 of them- about $3 for each decal! (Yikes!)  When he is
finished restoring a tool to his satisfaction, he slides on the decal and
it looks 'factory fresh'.)  I'm just curious to know if new technology
makes this less expensive?..." 

I think of a "decal" as being on a clear carrier, where you wet the back with
water and it sticks by itself. I don't know anything about those, not even the
actual plastic used as the carrier.

Paper labels, if I wanted to reproduce a paper label I would color-xerox it and
then paste or glue it on. The colors might be a bit less vibrant and metallic
"gold" would come out as yellow, but you would probably need a sharp eye to
notice, especially under layers of shellac and dirt. I wouldn't mark something I
made with a label, though: they are too fragile, and if I sign something I want
it to last. And if I'm restoring an old tool or a box, I might put a new label
on a box (not a tool) but I wouldn't want it to be a perfect undetectable match
for the original. That is skating a little to close to faking for my taste.

I am guessing here, but I would say that to get a really close match you need to
use the same printing method as the original. If the original was a mass
production method you can have a long set-up time and spread it over so many
units that the price is still very low. If you are printing a fairly small
number for use in restoration, then the long set-up time would weigh much
heavier on each unit. Also, exact color-matching to an original can be extremely
time-consuing, much more so than getting the colors right in the first place, or
doing a second runwhen you have records of the colors and quantities you used.
Between the two you can get an honorable explanation for high price of
reproduction decals. This is just speculation on my part, though.

Tom Conroy

Recent Bios FAQ